Kids' sports fees

01
.Following the fees

There’s a lot of money in
children’s sports these days
– particularly in youth soccer, where $400 registration fees are not uncommon. But where are all those dollars going? They don't seem to be going toward
quality coaching – that’s generally done
by unqualified volunteers who may have
only a passing acquaintance with the
game. Fields can also be in poor shape,
and the quality of officiating can be questionable. With 600,000 youth players across the country all paying substantial fees, there appears to be a lot of development money on hand. But instead of progressing through a
system that’s meant to turn Australia
into a world-class contender, many
young footballers end up bailing out in their early teens.

In at least some cases, youth
registration fees are apparently
being siphoned off to bankroll
elite regional teams
whose players may
have a shot at the
A-League or a
national team.
Yet there’s little
evidence that any of
these teams or players
are giving anything
back to the youth teams
that partly finance them,
such as regular training
or coaching sessions.
Former Socceroos
midfielder and now
chief soccer analyst for
SBS Craig Foster put a
fine point on the issue in
a blog post two years ago:
“In some areas of the country,
kids are paying registration fees of
up to $400, which is ridiculous for a game
that should always be available to all. This
simply has to stop. It’s counter-productive
to football’s progress.”
And he says it gets worse when
it comes to selective youth teams,
where fees can exceed $2000.

“The main reason for the [premier
youth] fees is that premier and state
league clubs are paying their first-team
players hundreds of dollars a week and
passing the cost on to the parents of
their youth teams … The disgraceful
gouging of parents must come to an
end,” Foster wrote. He also pointed out
that a “national study into the football
economy is required to track where
the registration fees go” and called
on Football Federation Australia
(FFA) to initiate such a project. So
far, that hasn’t happened.

Who's FFA?

Founded in 2004, FFA says in its
mission statement that it has a “long-term
vision is to establish Australia
as a truly world-class football nation”.
In addition to helping build A-League
and national teams, the association
is accountable to the “football
community”. According to its
constitution, it is charged with
governing state soccer bodies and
leagues, and “encouraging football
games at all levels”. It appears to
be a well-resourced organisation - its corporate partners include
Qantas, Hyundai, Nike, Westfield,
NAB and Optus.

While Foster didn’t respond to our
request for comment, FFA freely
admitted “junior registrations” are
a source of revenue for elite regional
teams across Australia, most of which
lack other reliable sources of revenue.
“It’s an issue we’re trying to find a way
to fix, but there’s no overnight
fix. It’s a complicated
beast,” says FFR public relations manager
Mark Jensen.
In one example
of the FFA’s
efforts to impose a
national approach to
youth clubs, it recently
introduced an Australia-wide
registration system. In
the case of NSW, Jensen
says FFA gets about $17
of each registration,
while Football NSW
gets about $30, a
breakdown that’s
similar from state to
state. Of the 1.7 million
youth players in the country
(including schools and futsal),
about 600,000 register through FFA via
their respective clubs. The remainder of
the money is then sent back to the clubs
and is out of FFA’s hands. “The new
online system is purely an administrative
tool so local clubs don’t have to deal with
the time-consuming task of processing
hundreds of registrations,” Jensen says.

Declining skills

However, when it comes to financial
management within clubs,
centralised control has its limits.
After FFA takes its cut of
registration fees, it doesn’t require
transparency about where the rest
of the money goes.
Jensen acknowledges this is a problem.
“Not all clubs disclose their costs online
or in regular reports, and this is
where you start seeing clubs
gouging their players with
fees as high as $400 or $500," he says.
"It’s definitely a concern for
us. We want to make sure
kids can get to the elite
level without having to
pay through the nose.”

One way FFA is trying
to cut down on gouging is by
helping regional teams find
ways to raise revenue
other than through
junior registrations,
Jensen says. Another is
by preventing regional
teams from overpaying
their players. To that
end, FFA has proposed
a salary cap on “homegrown”
players – those who’ve
come up through the junior clubs.
However, it’s still only a proposal
at this stage.
Jensen argues that FFA took steps in
2009 to arrest a noticeable decline in the
skill levels of players aged 6-12, chiefly
by appointing a national program
technical director and offering free
coaching clinics for parent coaches.
FFA expects the initiatives to pay off
over the long term, but Jensen couldn’t
say when that might happen.

Universal issue

It’s a situation that will sound familiar to parents in the US, another country where kids play plenty of soccer, but
which is a long way from World Cup glory.
At his website Soccer Mom Manual, longtime
US youth coach and blogger Mike
Slatton says fees in the US have been on
the increase since the late 1990s or so,
when soccer clubs began paying coaches,
hiring technical directors and requiring
kids to buy guernseys for practice as well as for games, along with various
other items of equipment.
Despite soccer being
one of the biggest youth
sports in the US, skill
levels have remained
stagnant - and Slatton
thinks he knows why.
“The greed that has
permeated our country’s
youth soccer programs
is holding up the
development of our
players by requiring
every person who
wants to play to pay
outrageous fees that
get more and more
expensive as the
players get older," he explains. "If you leave out
the horrible training and
overwhelming payrolls, all that’s left
is four hours a week of toe taps on the
ball, dribbling through cones, shooting
on empty nets and a game on Saturday.
At this pace, it would mean that our
players would be in their 40s and 50s
when they finally have the knowledge
and experience to compete against
European and South American teams
for the World Cup trophy.”

Closed books

Whether or not it’s fair for community youth programs to help
pay for the development of elite teams,
it seems reasonable to expect a certain
degree of transparency about where the
registration money goes. CHOICE has
heard from a number of consumers
that insurance costs are
sometimes cited as a reason
for high fees, but how
are parents to know
whether this is the
case if they can’t
see how much the association is paying
in premiums?
According to the Corporations Act,
any club or business qualifies as a
“reporting entity” and must produce
financial reports that meet certain
standards if it is “reasonable to expect the
existence of users who rely on the entity’s
general purpose financial report for
information that will be useful
to them for making and evaluating
decisions about the allocation of
resources”.

In another instance, the
regulator puts it more simply, saying
reporting is required “if there are
substantial sums of money involved”.
ASIC spokesperson Daniel Wright
told us some soccer associations may
be exempt from
the act and instead
be defined as
incorporated
associations. In
this case, reporting
requirements are
determined by
state agencies,
are less stringent,
and vary from
state to state - but
such associations
may still have to
lodge an annual
financial statement.
In NSW, most
soccer clubs are
incorporated, says
Laura Hofman, of the NSW Office of Communities. Under rules overseen
by NSW Fair Trading, incorporated
clubs must hold annual general meetings
and release audited financial reports if
annual revenue exceeds $250,000 or
assets are over $500,000. (Clubs with
less income and fewer assets need only
submit a summary of their financial
affairs to the AGM.) But there’s no
requirement that such reports be made
publicly available outside the AGM,
such as on the club’s website.